By Vagnes De La Rosa
May 31, 2019
The summer of 1989 was the best summer of my life.
I had just graduated high school and was spending it getting ready for college with three other teen friends. They called us The D’s, because we had a D in our name. They happen to be some of my best friends to this day. Our lives were on the cusp of a trajectory that would lead to us becoming a business owner, a social worker, a pastor and me, an executive at a nonprofit whose mission is to help victims of crime. I’m proud of where we landed. But it would have been so easy for our lives to have turned out differently.
I grew up a Latino male in Washington Heights, just a few blocks from Central Park. That summer, I could have very well been hanging out in Central Park. If I had been, my life might have dramatically changed forever.
That summer, Trisha Meili, a white woman who had been jogging in Central Park, was assaulted and raped. The crime was vicious. She was left for dead and remained in a coma for 12 days. It was one of the most widely publicized crimes of the decade. Following the rape, five boys of color, ages 14 to 16, were arrested and convicted of the crime. Known as “the Central Park Five,” they spent between 6 and 13 years in prison.
Later, another man would confess to the crime. DNA evidence would confirm his guilt, and the Central Park Five’s convictions would be vacated. This confirmed my belief that the five boys had suffered a great miscarriage of justice.
The Central Park Five are back in the conversation because of Ava DuVernay’s mini-series, “When They See Us,” a dramatization about the legal proceedings that put five young men of color in prison for a crime another man admitted committing.
The night the Central Park Five were arrested, I was 18, only a few years older than them. When I see Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam, I still see me in the summer of 1989.
I also see our clients, some of whom are boys and young men of color.
Part of the reason that the Central Park Five continues to resonate so deeply with me and many others is that young men of color still face injustice at the hands of our criminal justice system.
That’s a problem on a systemic level. It also makes our work at Safe Horizon more difficult.
When someone mistrusts the system – especially if they mistrust it with good reason – they are less likely to seek help, even from Safe Horizon.
At Safe Horizon, we serve thousands of male survivors of crime and abuse every year. But we know many more need our services but don’t get them.
Young men of color are more likely than any other group to be a victim of violence. Young black and Latino men face the highest rates of homicide. And black youth are more likely to be robbed than any other demographic group.
Yet research shows that these young men frequently cope with the aftermath of violence alone.
We must start to see young men of color as the victims they often are. Then we can do a better job offering and connecting these young men to the services they need and deserve.
We will also be able to better acknowledge that young men of color are at greater risk of being victimized through a wrongful arrest or conviction.
“Summer of ‘89” happens to also be a song by Butch Walker and the Black Widows which contains this line: “Can I go back to when I was a winner, way before the rain came.”
For me, when I think back to 1989, I remember the fun times I had connecting with my boys, planning our futures and looking forward to a great life ahead of us. But for too many young men of color, that hope can be taken away by an inequitable criminal justice system or another type of victimization that’s never even acknowledged.